


This Kills Monsters

by Miniatures



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Ending, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bill Hader Should Never Cry Like That So I'm Fixing It, Bisexual Richie Tozier, Canon Compliant until it's not, Character Death Fix, F/M, Fix-It, Gay Eddie Kaspbrak, I don't actually mention him being bisexual but if I ever write him he's bisexual that's facts, IT Chapter Two Spoilers, Losers Club (IT) Friendship, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-08
Updated: 2019-09-08
Packaged: 2020-10-12 12:00:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20563964
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miniatures/pseuds/Miniatures
Summary: Belief can kill monsters, but Richie thinks it might also be able to raise the dead.





	This Kills Monsters

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kaboomslang](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaboomslang/gifts).

> Mild Disclaimer Time Because I Believe in Credit: The opening scene is largely just a prose-ified version of a scene from the movie, the blocking and spoken dialogue up until after Bev's line ("He's dead") is obviously not mine. 
> 
> Richie thinking "He shouldn’t be down here" about Eddie in the sewers is borrowed verbatim from the book, when they go down there as children.

“Eddie, Eddie.” 

Richie’s gone before the others have a chance to move. He doesn’t care if they follow him—he knows they will, but it doesn’t matter. Eddie is slumped against the stone, his face ghoulishly pale in the washed-out green of the sewer light. His eyes are half-closed, downcast. Richie goes to his knees and ignores the stillness. 

“Hey, Eds, man, we got Pennywise, man!” He grins—he can’t help it, it rises out of him like his shaky, giddy laugh on a bubble of adrenaline. But Eddie doesn’t respond. There’s no answering smile, not even a rolled eye. Richie cups his cheek, lets his thumb half-graze the gauze and tape still blanketing Bowers’ stab wound. Behind him, he hears their friends shuffling in the dark, watching them. “Hey...” 

It hasn’t been long enough for Eddie to be cold. His skin is still lingering with life, still soft and faintly bloodwarm under Richie’s palm. But it’s _wrong_—and Richie knows it, feels his face fall. _He shouldn’t be down here,_ he thinks. _This isn’t good for him, this isn’t... not in his condition _... 

He strokes his face again. Too still, too quiet. Richie feels the bubble turn to lead in his throat and he clamps his lips tight around the sob that threatens to escape. Crying won’t help, it will only make it real. 

Bev sniffs. “Richie...” 

Gently, too gently, Bill says (_don’t fucking say it),_ “E-Eddie’s gone.” 

“He’s all right, no, he’s just hurt, we gotta get him outta here, he’s just hurt, okay?” —_he’s too warm, too whole, too perfect to be gone. We weren’t finished. He can’t be gone, because I never—he never— “ _He’s okay, we gotta get him outta here, Bev!” 

They’re all looking at him now, all crying, because they don’t understand how it solidifies the body under Richie’s hands. They’re looking at him like Eddie was always just a body, like Richie was the only one who imagined the little boy with asthma, the man with sad, dark eyes and a nervous smile. They’re looking at him with _pity_. He hates it. He hates that they can’t feel how fucking warm Eddie still is. 

“Richie.” 

He can’t look at Bev, he can’t, but he does. “_What _?” 

“Hon...” Her mouth forms the rest of the word but her voice falls apart. “Honey, he’s dead.” 

The word lands like a thud on his heart—a boot in the face, the slamming of a door._ Dead _ . So final and unfair. But it couldn’t be right, it couldn’t be true. Dead was for other people and other stories. This isn’t just anyone lying in front of him, still and white. It’s Eddie. It simply isn’t possible for Eddie to be _dead_. 

Richie gathers Eddie to his breast, burrows his face in his still, white throat. He tightens his grip on Eddie, on the body, on the body that houses his best friend and his first—last—only— 

But that’s another word he can't bring himself to hear or say. 

Mike and Bill and Ben and Bev are near him now. They begin pulling at him, more roughly as the sound of crunching, tumbling stone grows louder. Richie refuses to let go. 

_ You can’t be gone,_ he thinks. _I’m not ready for you to be gone. I never will be, but I shouldn’t have to be ready now, because you’re not gone. _

Out loud, he whispers into the shell of Eddie’s ear, “It’s not happening. This isn’t real, I won’t let it be real, okay? I won’t let that fucker take you. You’re alive, you’re okay, you got that, you little shit? You’re _fine,_ and you’re gonna get up.” 

“Rich,” says Ben, “we won’t make it if we have to carry him. We have to go!” 

Mike, softly—“Maybe we don’t have to carry him. Maybe he _is _okay.” 

“What, are you nuts? You saw what happened—” 

“Maybe,” Mike says, “we should listen to Richie.” 

Richie smiles, but doesn’t look back. His eyes are squeezed shut, and he’s holding Eddie, and he’s begging him to get on his stupid fucking feet and run like his shitheel mother never let him run. And behind him, Mike and Bill and Ben and Bev are starting to join him. 

_ I won’t let you go. I believe you’re still here. I believe it, and I’m gonna make it real, you hear me _? 

The walls are falling in around them, and they’re still chanting, insisting, _demanding _that Eddie is alive. 

Richie presses a kiss to that still, white throat, and he feels a pulse beneath his lips. 

They stagger into the light with Eddie in tow. His heart is beating but he’s only half-conscious, held up between Ben and Richie and dragged along on heavy feet. The six of them collapse in the street in front of the Neibolt house and watch it collapse with them. 

Eddie is limp in Richie’s lap now, his back propped against Richie’s chest and legs sprawled out on the asphalt in front of them. His shirt is still torn and sticky with spent blood, but the hole in his body has healed itself already. There’s a scar like a knot in the middle of him. Richie strokes his hair, tucks his chin over the crook of his neck, and stares down at the knot that was, minutes ago, a pit of black blood. 

“Wh... what are you doing?” 

Eddie’s voice is hoarse, but it’s there. It’s real like tears, like bodies, like belief. 

Richie laughs. “Spooning you, lover. The fuck you think I’m doing, I’m making sure you don’t crack your head on the sidewalk!” 

“Ha. What—” Eddie pokes at his belly, at the knot. “I thought I was a goner, holy shit.” 

“You w-were,” Bill says. He’s smiling now, the first real, genuine, Big Bill smile Richie’s seen in a long time. “But R-Richie wasn’t about t-to let it stick.” 

Beverly joins him. So do the others. Then all six surviving Losers are hugging, wrapped around the soft, caramel center that is Eddie Kaspbrak, alive and kicking. Richie expects him to wriggle out of it, or complain about them cutting off his air supply. Eddie just hugs them back. 

The quarry is waiting for them, green glass beneath towering white cliffs. Beverly is the first to step over the NO TRESPASSING fence, her eyes gleaming with the same cheek and bravery that made all the Losers fall for her twenty-seven years ago. She’s the first to leap, too. 

Cold engulfs Richie’s head and shocks his brain into a soft reset. When he surfaces, he feels as if the years have melted off along with the top layer of grime and blood. He’s thirteen again, wearing starchy underwear and trying not to stare at what then seemed like miles of untouchable Eddie. 

Eddie crashes and surfaces a foot away from him, but he seems as untouchable as ever. He’s _alive_, he’s there, and Richie will never let him live down the fact that he willed him back into existence. But he pushes the hair out of his eyes with his left hand, and the sun catches on the gold of his wedding ring. _He’ll be going home soon,_ Richie thinks. _He’s gonna go home to his wife. Nice job, Trashmouth,__ you saved him for her._

(He isn't about to regret it. But he had more than earned the right to be jealous, he reasons.) 

Ben and Bev are circling each other in the water, eyes fixed upon one another. Even if Ben hadn’t lost the weight, Richie has a feeling they still would have ended up here. He sees a recognition in their gazes, the kind of bone-deep _oh, there you are _feeling that most people dream of finding at least once in their lives. Richie thinks the six—seven—of them were lucky. It might not have been romantic, but they’d all felt that revelation, that _oh _, when they met as children. 

He supposes Ben and Bev are twice lucky, that they’d found that feeling first with their friends, and then again with just the two of them. 

“Hey, Rich.” 

Eddie comes up beside him, close enough that Richie can feel his warmth. It triggers a bolt of relief in him again, reassurance that he isn’t imagining things, that it isn’t a trick. 

“‘Sup, Eds?” _Keepin’ it cool, good job._

“I didn’t, ah, I didn’t get to finish what I was saying, back there.” Eddie looks nervous—he always looks nervous, but this strikes Richie as different. “I said I had something to tell you, remember?” 

Richie raises an eyebrow. “I seem to remember fucking my mom came up. I mean, it’s a fair trade, your mom was so good to me, I figure it was about time we swapped. But if there’s more to that story, I don’t wanna hear it, I’ve been traumatized enough for one... forever.” 

“No, asshole, after that.” 

After that. When the others were facing Pennywise, and Richie had refused to leave Eddie’s side. Eddie had drawn him close, put a hand on his cheek. _ I have to tell you something else. You know I... I... _But then he’d broken into ragged coughs, and everyone else began their final assault on Pennywise—Eddie had squeezed Richie’s hand and told him to go. He’d tell him later. And then later had almost been too late. 

“Right, the would-be deathbed confession. I know, I know it was you who spilled that Coke on my comic collection, but don’t worry, I called off the hit years ago.” 

Eddie smacks him lightly in the arm. Richie grins at him and sees his mouth twitch in response. 

“Okay, fine,” Richie says, “what is it?” 

Silence. Eddie looks like a body again, like his soul has fled—his face is white, and then it turns red and hot. “I... I’m leaving Myra. My wife, Myra. I was a total coward, fuck, I left her a _note _before I came back to Derry. I know I’m gonna have to go back and actually explain shit to her, and that’s gonna be rough, but I’m doing it. She deserves that much.” 

Richie does his best to keep his expression neutral. He’s fairly certain he fails. “That’s what you were gonna tell me? With your _dying breath_, you were gonna tell me you were planning on getting a divorce? I gotta say, Eddie, that’s about as lame as the mom joke.” 

“No!” Eddie sputters, spits out some water as he loses his footing and flails. “No, no—that's part of it, that’s not all of it. Not the main part, at least. I just wanted you to know that, first.” 

“O... kay. Well, then I’m lost.” He isn’t, not entirely, but he doesn’t dare hope to hear what he thinks Eddie’s about to say. 

“I’m leaving Myra because I don’t love her,” Eddie says. “I don’t love her because I... I don’t think I can. There’s nothing wrong with _her _—she's a mess, but so am I. I can’t love her, and I think... I think...” He swallows and shuts his eyes. “I think it’s because she’s a woman.” 

He says it so quiet Richie isn’t sure he’s heard him properly. But the words echo in his head once, twice, three times until he finally processes them, and he swallows too. 

“So... you’re gay?” 

Eddie flinches. He nods, tightlipped and white again. “Please don’t hate me, Richie.” 

“_Eds_!” 

“I know, you’ll say you don’t. You couldn’t. But I know how things are. It’s okay if you do, especially because—because—fuck it, the whole fucking _ reason _ I left Myra that note is because the first thing I remembered was you.” Eddie opens his eyes. There’s so much pain and fear in them, but so much courage, too. Richie might have fallen for him right then and there, if he hadn’t already done it. “I remembered Richie Tozier, and I knew I had to come home to him.” 

Richie’s crowding close before Eddie has a chance to move. He’s still and stiff in Richie’s arms as the kiss begins, and he looses a startled squeak into Richie’s mouth that makes Richie love him even more. Then he softens, and opens, and they’re flush against each other, and Eddie is warm, warm, warm— 

They break apart at the sound of wolf-whistles from Bill and Mike. Ben and Bev, still swimming together, are laughing happily. 

“Thank _God_!” Beverly says. “I thought we’d have to wait another twenty-seven years.” 

**Author's Note:**

> I'm FINE 
> 
> (One More Mild Disclaimer: "You know I... I..." is also borrowed verbatim from the book, from That Scene. Because I'm still bitter they turned that into a joke and basically robbed Eddie of his final words - TO RICHIE - and almost-confession, because if you're gonna make the feelings CANON why would you DO that you utter FOOLS - *ahem*)


End file.
